UNDP Pacific Centre

The Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific established the Pacific Centre in Suva, Fiji, in 2006, to ensure effective, timely and responsive support tailored to the needs and priorities of Pacific Island Countries.

The Pacific Centre supports the work of the UNDP Country Offices in the Pacific and implements a range of regional and sub-regional initiatives. The Pacific Centre provides on request policy advisory; technical backstopping for programme design and implementation; and knowledge management support to UNDP Country Offices in the Pacific, namely the Samoa Multi-Country Office, Fiji Multi-Country Office and PNG Country Office, as well as to Pacific Island governments, intergovernmental agencies and civil society organisations.

The Centre’s work focuses on four key thematic areas:

Crisis Prevention and Recovery;

Democratic Governance;

Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Achievement and Poverty Reduction, including work on HIV, health and development, environment, energy and climate change; and

Financial Inclusion.

The Crisis Prevention and Recovery team works with national and regional partners to promote peace building and conflict prevention. It has specific projects addressing peace and dialogue, human security as well as security sector governance. Another component of the team works in the area of disaster risk reduction.

The Democratic Governance team works with national governments, CSOs and regional organisations to promote good governance. It has specific projects in the areas of anti-corruption, parliamentary and democratic institutions development, social accountability and human rights.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Achievement and Poverty Reduction team partners with regional organisations, national governments to support national sustainable development strategies, achievement of the MDGs, private sector development and entrepreneurship development. The team also works in the areas of intersectoral response to HIV and non-communicable diseases epidemics, environment, energy and climate change.

Work to promote financial inclusion is undertaken by the Pacific Financial Inclusion Programme’s (PFIP) which has as a goal to reach at least 500,000 of the unbanked population in the Pacific by 2013. This goal is being accomplished by providing sustainable financial services to 70% of Pacific Islanders who remain unbanked today. PFIP believes that those who are financially excluded are not able to achieve their full economic potential and are denied the opportunities to attain a productive and dignified living. Through innovation, PFIP has introduced several scalable and replicable projects that have brought the project closer to achieving its goals.

Work towards women’s empowerment and gender equality underpins much of the activity in the Pacific Centre. Gender is mainstreamed across each of the thematic areas. An important segment of that work involves applied research and publication that adds to the body of knowledge on gender equality across the Pacific region.